Case in Point
by Lady Viola Delesseps
Summary: At 4 a.m. Sherlock Holmes sits down at his computer and begins to type, if only to get the words out of his brain and on to the screen, regarding emotion, human nature, and John Watson. BBC version.


I cannot believe it. It goes against all probability, both as far as both mathematical certainty and human nature is concerned. Ignore those idiots who say that human nature cannot be absolutely predicted with numerical calculations or psychological deductions. It can. What they mean is that they cannot do it. People are so predictable, for the most part, and it is only when they tend to be the slightest bit original in their thought patterns and reactions that I take an interest. Perhaps that is what has kept me on this case for so long.

Going back over every single piece of data in my mind that concerns the issue, I can pick up very few indications of this outcome. Unless one should be considering the facts that his sister had set the precedent, his military career had surrounded him with the possibility, and each person who ran across him assumed the status. Despite the fact that it was not true. Perhaps it is that which has thrown me off. Assuming something that is unfounded is the most elementary way of putting someone off the scent. They know it to be untrue, and dismiss it as faulty reckoning or foolish conjecture, leaving the truth thrown into sharp relief on the opposite wall. If only they were clever enough to turn around to see that it was, in fact, true, they would realize the were tricked by the typical sleight of hand. Like the cabbie case, he gives me the pill he wishes me to take because he figures I will think of reaching for his, only to realize this was his original intent. So I take the one before me. What a fool. I know the things to look for, and most certainly none of them appear in the way I thought they should. His shorter stature does not come into play; or does it?

I hate this. The feeling of being so utterly out of control, outwitted, and outmatched at last over something so _trivial_ has to be one of the most wretched feelings. I shudder to think of the regularity with which ordinary people experience these emotions. Emotions slow me down. They have been slowing him down as well, and I have been too dense to see it. That is why he seems so dull. Curse emotions. What good did they ever do? When anything was happening that mattered, that is.

I am typing because I cannot sleep. I am rarely tired, tiredness being the result only of my mind being inactive. Yes, I get headaches from understimulation. I remember nearly dying of a migraine once when I was eleven years old and spent the day with Mycroft and our great aunt in Devon. But now, I am I sleepless and absolutely irate at myself. I don't know what to do with this, now that I have come to a conclusion. This is not something that I can order LeStrade to take care, of or even do myself.

The facts are elusive, but present, and they have been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. The fact that it never even crossed my mind makes it all the more maddening. Funny how I can look at a complete stranger and know nearly everything about them, but someone that I spend days, nights, and weekends with I begin to see through a fog. It is like a chemical imbalance in my body and in my mind that refuses to let me recognize the truth through this haze of familiarity. We laugh so much sometimes I begin to think that a little emotion now and then would not be an entirely bad thing. But then it opens the door for things like this. Feelings are a dangerous habit to get in to. Most people don't even realize that it is just that, a habit. They think it is human nature. But then, what do I really know of human nature? Not much, I'm discovering. It is extremely irritating. Must I then, defer to someone better versed in these things, if only to give him some sort of response to this question he has put to me? It is a question which, though unspoken, begs for an answer as surely as my mind begs to be challenged, and my legs beg to be walked on.

No. The answer is no. I cannot get entangled in this, it would slow down my work to infinite uselessness. What if I were to begin experiencing similar things? Sometimes I begin to think that I am, but I attribute it to the need for nicotine, or the strange fancies which accompany working around too many strong chemicals. A look, a gesture. That infinitesimal linger in a handshake, that slight twitch of the stomach. Wondering what I am doing, no, he knows. Feeling expressive, no, feeling helpless. Needing to excuse himself, no, needing human touch (though what it does to a person I don't know aside from the release of serotonin in the brain and the increase in firing the speed of the synapses). Feeling as if his spine were out of place, no, feeling as if his trousers were suddenly constricting. Oh, heavens.

I haven't put thought into this since primary school. And Mycroft's lectures about the needlessness of certain bodily functions first inspired curiosity, and then boredom. To be reduced to such feral instincts, to behave in an animalistic way, throwing reason out the window to madly perpetuate one's race has to be one of the basest of acts. Which is perhaps why is has never interested me. Anything which does not involve the use of the mind (and I may be mistaken, but it is so cliché for people to say that they could not think, only "do") has a great revulsion for me. So I cannot understand why such instincts would be awakened in a clearly unnatural way.

Perhaps that is it. If reason were an end in itself as far as such things go, then no one would ever submit themselves to such self-debasement, such self-punishment. It is precisely that this attraction goes against nature that intrigues me. Some reject it as disgusting, and some welcome it as progressive. But only one dismisses it as boring. Though, if it were truly boring I would not be up at 4:18a.m. typing one and a fourth thousand (at that point) words on the subject.

I'll leave it there for now. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to shed more light on the subject. Idiot. There is no more light to be shed – besides, that is a boring overused expression. Expression. Perhaps that's the key. Though I say that I could not care less, there is a part of me that is seldom used, located in the left side of my chest, and unfortunately controlling the rostral cingulate in my brain that has been more exercised recently than at any other point in my life. It's an undeniable fact. I am just afraid that, as emotions have a habit of being, his will be shifting and temporary. Facts are ever-present, and unchanging. Emotions are a storm that one's self can get caught up in and swept away; true self should be able to observe them and draw the appropriate conclusion. Why is it, then, that the only conclusion is so shockingly inappropriate? And must I really reconcile the transience of feeling with the solidness of fact? Only when it is a fact that feelings exist. Yet just because they exist does not mean one should act on them. Can John Watson be faulted for that?

I'm going to bed now, it is 4:32. Note, I said bed, not sleep. I really ought to be congratulated for the effort at least. John would be proud.


End file.
